Wednesday, June 12, 2013

I don’t know about
you, but I have a soft, soft spot for those felicitous accidents that snapshots,
alone among photographs, allowed and even encouraged. The most obvious of
these happened because snapshot photography was such a profoundly lo-fi medium—the
process was a minefield of random technical noise from start to finish. The cameras
were primitive or at least simple and didn’t always do what was asked of them;
development and printing were slapdash and full of hazards; and very often the
finished prints were neglected and subject to wear and damage. All these impersonal
factors could work in a photo’s favor, even create the point of interest from
our perspective. Here’s an example.

A bit less
obviously, there were also accidents that someone actually had something to do
with—the accidents of camera handling, composition, and so forth that resulted from the indiscriminate technique and low standards of the
snapshooters. Here’s one of those.

How does any of that
apply to this snapshot?

It doesn’t. The
picture is technically as perfect as anyone could expect, and we might as well
assume that it represents the snapshooter’s intention accurately.

Nevertheless, it is
accidental in one all-important way. It is accidental in the sense that it
happens to resemble an art photo from my or our point of view. We have every
reason to believe it was intended as one kind of photo, but it was lucky enough
to (eventually) look like another kind of photo.

In fact the picture got
so lucky that it accidentally gained entree to an aesthetic subgenre that enjoys
some popularity today, the “faceless” snapshot. The snapshooter couldn’t have dreamed
that we in the present would care about the photo that way. There’s a huge
number of more private subgenres; most snapshot collectors have some specialized
aesthetic tastes that are pretty much theirs alone. They may not ever have put
their preferences into words. They may just say, “I like this photo.” But a
snapshot is unimaginably lucky if a collector likes it—that is, if a collector feels
like pulling it out of its original context and placing it in his or her own.

Otherwise put: this
photo is a found photo, a kind of found object. A found object, by definition,
plays on an accident that allows it to move from one context to another.

Found objects have
existed since 1914, when Marcel Duchamp spotted this bottle rack in a hardware
store.

Now, someone created
this object with eyes wide open, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that anonymous industrial
designer wanted it to look good as well as do its job. But its resemblance to
sculpture is still accidental. Duchamp thought that was funny, and, making a
sort of revolutionary joke, he presented it as art.

We do the same with
found photos. We are not necessarily making a joke, and the revolutionary tinge
of our recontextualization has faded a good deal in the century since Duchamp.
However, we are still taking non-art that accidentally looks like some modern idea
of art and presenting it as exactly that. In so doing we are not necessarily saying
that someone didn’t make that non-art deliberately. We are just saying they
didn’t make it as art.

So far I am simply laying
out what found photos are, strictly speaking. Accident is part of the idea. But
are we treating all snapshots—all the
photos taken with snapshot cameras that we are able to appreciate
aesthetically—as found photos? Are we twisting them all, or are there some that
we can appreciate straightforwardly the way they were meant to be?

One promising class of possibilities is the
class of altered snapshots. This hand-colored one is a representative example.

Whoever did the tinting knew what they were
doing, and I think we can simply say they were good. But of course what we are
appreciating is a painting superimposed on a photo. The underlying photo is as
odd and as mysteriously intended a snapshot as any I have seen. We look at the
photo as a found photo, the painting as a painting. In other cases, of course,
the compound object can be a skilled painting on top of a photo that isn’t even
interesting enough to be “found.” The underlying distinction is that a painting
is always “wrought”—we can see that somebody worked at it; whereas it’s much
harder to see that in a photo.

Here’s a more serious case—in fact about as
serious a case as I can imagine.

Usually snapshot self-portraits are a genre comparable
to mask shots: at the time they were just people goofing, but now they’re an
art category (if a rather tired one). Usually, in other words, a snapshot
self-portrait is a found photo. But this picture seems to be something special.
It’s not implausible to regard it as an incursion from a more art-like
photography. I don’t know if Vivian Maier ever took a Kodacolor snapshot, but
that’s what this photo looks like—it’s like a Maier self-portrait taken with
low-grade (though not too low-grade)
equipment and developed in an anonymous lab like every other snapshot.

One good response to this rather startling
example would be to say it’s so far out that it proves the rule. But is it even
that far out? I’m not sure. I propose two thought experiments:

(1) Imagine
this photo with technical values more typical for snapshots: problems from a bad
lens, flawed printing, etc. A photo doesn’t tell us why it was made; the
information it imparts is not that kind of information. When we do understand
why it was made, we come to our conclusions based on factors strictly external
to the shot itself—on the way it was made into an actual photograph and the way
that photo is presented. For example, a view of a crime scene would have very
different meanings as an 8x10 glossy and as a snapshot. When we see a Nan
Goldin photo hanging in a gallery, we feel we know why she made it; we would
“know” something else about why it was made if we saw it printed poorly and
at reduced size, pasted into someone’s snapshot album. This photo reminds us of
art, but it would remind us of art a lot less if its technical values were not
exceptional for snapshots.

(2) Imagine
the photographer-subject with a silly expression on her face instead of a grave
one. In this case we would be much more inclined to class the picture as a
well-photographed stunt.

Can those two factors—the relative superiority
of the photo’s “production values” and the serious expression on the
photographer-subject’s face—really be all that’s telling us the photographer might
have intended the photo the way we see it? I believe so. I don’t say she didn’t,
you understand—more pictures by the same photographer might clinch the case. But
nothing else would.

Let me put this as clearly as possible. A snapshot that we appreciate aesthetically
is a found photo—an accident—unless we have to take the snapshooter as
seriously as we take the snapshot. And that is incredibly rare.

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About Me

I'm a collector and dealer of vintage photos and ephemera. You can find my wares at www.houseofmirthphotos.com and as houseofmirth on ebay. I also set up at several different shows throuhgout the year.